“Technology can become the ‘wings’ that will allow the educational world to fly farther and faster than ever before; if we will allow it.” – Jenny Arledge.
Over the years, e-learning has become a household term and practice. In today’s day and age, technology has no bounds, and with it comes the development of the educational space as well.
As more and more kids get access to smartphones, tablets, and laptops, schools and colleges are building on the facility and constructing more and more online courses and textbooks, holding online exams, and more.
Following the trend, or rather trailblazing it in a way, is LogicielEducatif.fr.
LogicielEducatif.fr is a French website that aims to help elementary students with their everyday school learning but in a fun and interactive manner.
But this website wasn’t always in the cards. It came about on the whim of its creator, Gildas Croyal. Although, that doesn’t mean he didn’t put his all into bringing this website to the heights it has achieved today.
In this post today, we will look into the beginning, middle, and continuing stages of LogicielEducatif and its founder, Gildas Croyal.
So buckle up, and let’s get started! 🙂
The Birth of LogicielEducatif
The world knows Gildas as a teacher who started his own educational games website to make school lessons easier and fun for the students, but that wasn’t how it all began.
Gildas had tried his hands at several professions before he became a teacher. He had studied and even worked in finance before pursuing a licensed education in philosophy. But then he decided to try his hand at music because he found it fascinating.
This fascination drove Gildas to undertake music studies at the conservatory to become a performing musician. Talk about a man following his heart through and through.
It was while he was pursuing music that he first started working with primary school children. Gildas and the students even created a CD together. And it was here that he discovered his love of children and how he wanted to become a teacher.
Gildas quickly encountered a trouble point in the educational system. His students were struggling with the lessons. In his own words:
“These kids are often at odds with traditional learning, so you have to be creative to get them interested in learning.”
Gildas tried to look for ways to keep the kids engaged before discovering digital technology’s impact on student motivation. He noticed that the contrast of the digital format to the paper medium was striking, so he wished to test it further.
Many games Gildas found online allowed the students to “win” without achieving the educational objective, especially by trial and error – which was very counterproductive in his eyes. So to overcome such a hurdle, he decided to create tailor-made educational games for his students himself.
He took into account the students’ as well as the teachers’ remarks to correct any mistake he made, both technical and pedagogical. He ensured that he met the expectations of his target audience.
As Gildas was the sole creator of these games and worked with multiple schools simultaneously, he finally decided to create a website for his games instead, which is how logicieleducatif.fr was born on March 30, 2009.
LogicielEducatif’s Road to Ad Monetization
In the early days, to access logicieleducatif.fr, one was required to install a plugin, which was not very complicated but was enough to dissuade both his students and their parents from playing the games.
Gildas learned very early on that he needed to make things as simple as possible to keep the users engaged, or else they would give up very quickly.
After a year on the web, Croyal opted for Flash technology, which was omnipresent on the web then. He was already winning with Flash technology because his website was installed in the browser by default, showing the games directly without user interaction.
Gildas even realized that it wasn’t just his students visiting the site, but other children and teachers were also playing his games.
Hard as it might be to believe, logicieleducatif.fr was never an earning medium for Gildas Croyal. In fact, at the very beginning, Gildas paid for a hosting platform, no matter how affordable, to run his website. But that all changed by 2012.
By then, the website traffic had grown too big to be on a shared hosting platform, but going premium was too expensive for Gildas to afford on a teacher’s salary. That’s how he first got interested in advertising.
After that, the website ranked well on Google, and monetization went well, so Gildas devoted himself to making his website more professional.
Even today, Gildas focuses on maintaining a good balance between ad placement and the actual content on the page because it is the educational material that drives the traffic in the first place.
He has been working with a French advertising agency that targets education and offers a significantly higher CPM than Google for ten years. But it isn’t the best fit for the website. The agency only supports a limited number of pages and represents a small minority of the whole, which doesn’t work too well in Gildas’ favor.
Other than that, the General Data Protection Regulations in France are pretty strict as well, which represents a significant shortfall when added to the adBlockers. Another hit to the website monetization. But with AdPushup, Gildas could recover a part of the revenue he lost due to these two major hurdles.
Though there are different methods to fool ad blockers and restore ad revenue, like alternate value exchange, ad reinsertion, and more, AdPushup uses its product AdRecover to reach AdBlock users.
AdRecover increases ad viewability while preserving the website’s user experience.
It doesn’t have a hardcoded ad layout, so Gildas A/B tests the ad layouts and ad unit setup before making informed choices that work best for his website. Also, as only permission-enabled, non-intrusive ads are shown to the users, it leads to higher click-through and conversion rates – a definite win for both Gildas and LogicielEducatif.
Know It From a Thought Leader
Gildas believes in the power of ad monetization but knows that there should be a threshold for the same, or else it interferes with user experience and jeopardizes the site traffic – a personal goal of AdPushup as well.
But more than anything, Gildas advocates having a passion for one’s work. He says:
“If you’re starting your own business, money shouldn’t be your priority. Instead, you should love what you’re doing, and then it won’t be like you’re at work, and your project will grow.”
And it is true, as can be seen with his own example. Because of this one man’s passion and drive, today, LogicielEducatif is on an upward and onward path with no end in sight.
